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In a nutshell, through luck. However, and given that the poor animal was clearly traumatised by everything that he had gone through, sometimes I wonder whether it was luck at all. Joy’s name as a dog did not in the end bring him joy in life.In my view, none of the family’s pet dogs was in the cellar-room in the Ipatiev House on that night in Yekaterinburg, just over 101 years ago on 16th / 17th July 1918, when the Imperial Family was led downstairs and told to wait. Given that the family believed at this point (or, at least, had been told) that they were being taken to another location for their safety, whether they actually believed that or not, you might be wondering why none of their dogs was with them in the soon-to-be murder room.This is especially so, given that the family had gone to the effort of bringing their beloved family pet dogs all the way from the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, thousands of kilometres to the West in European Russia, and had looked after them through periods of increasing deprivation and hardship in captivity first in Tobol’sk and later in Yekaterinburg. This is also in contrast with the family’s pet cats, all of whom were left behind in the Alexander Palace when the family left the place that they called ‘home’ for the last time on the morning of 1st August 1917, five months after the February Revolution that had brought about the abdication of the Tsar and his immediate family’s house arrest. When some former members of the family’s entourage arrived at the palace a few days later to secure the rooms and lock up the premises, they apparently found the cats wandering through the darkened hallways of the now-deserted palace in a state of abject misery, wailing from a sense of hunger, fear and abandonment. As it happens, the cats were the last living denizens of the Alexander Palace as a functioning palace.The family’s dogs, on the other hand, shared their masters’ exile and, with one proven exception, their eventual fate of being murdered. In all, there were three dogs who accompanied the Imperial Family into exile. They were:Ortino (Ортино), a French bulldog who was owned by the second eldest of the four Romanov sisters, Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna. Ortino’s name is sometimes given as Ortipo. However, I believe that this is through confusion between the Latin letter n and the Cyrillic letter for p, which looks like a Latin letter n, especially when handwritten.Jemmy (Джемми), a King Charles spaniel who belonged to the youngest of the sisters, Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna. His name is sometimes given as Jimmy (which would suggest a spelling of Джимми in Russian). However, when I first became aware of his existence (more years ago than I would like to admit), the name given for him in English transliteration was Jemmy. Moreover, and having recently seen a text about him that was written in Russian and clearly used the spelling Джемми, I am going to refer to him as Jemmy in this article.Joy (Джой), a cocker spaniel who was the Tsesarevitch Alexei’s dog and, it would seem, his constant companion and literal source of joy for the years that they were together. Quite a lot is known about him and his physical appearance, even in the absence of colour photographs. It is known, for example, that his coat was a mixture of white and very dark red in colour (what is called ‘liver-coloured’ in the context of spaniel breeds), which can also be inferred from the surviving photographs of him in monochrome. Perhaps uniquely amongst the Imperial Family’s pets, early silent film-footage of him playing with the Tsesarevitch survives to this day, so we can get a better idea of Joy as he was ‘in real life’ than is possible with any of the family’s other pets.Although in the end it was not enough to save them and their throne, the Romanovs in their day were quite adept at using what today we would call ‘PR’ as a means of bolstering their public image. As such, plenty of images (both still and motion-picture) of the Tsar, the Tsarina and their fortunately extremely photogenic children (and, in some cases, the latters’ pets) were produced at the time, for distribution within Russia and abroad.This photograph, taken circa 1913-1914 judging by the hairstyles and clothing of the children, is one of the rare images to show all three of the pet dogs who accompanied the Imperial Family into exile in August 1917, following them all the way until the murder of the Imperial Family at Yekaterinburg in July 1918. From left to right: Grand Duchess Anastasia with Jemmy, Grand Duchess Tatiana with Ortino and Tsesarevitch Alexei with JoyIn another curious difference in treatment between the family’s cats and its dogs, each of the dogs had a conspicuously foreign (or, at least, non-Russian) name. In contrast, the names of the cats that are mentioned in the surviving records are noticeably Slavic and down-to-earth in nature, to the point being ‘jokey’: Kor’ka (Корька, literally, ‘Corkscrew’ albeit in Ukrainian rather than Russian) and Zubrovka (Зубровка, literally, ‘Bisongrass’) are two of the cats’ names that survive in the records.In contrast, the conspicuously foreign names of the dogs may have had something to do with the fact that they were all of foreign breeds - French bulldog, King Charles spaniel and cocker spaniel - as well as the multilingual background of the family. In the case of Joy, I recall that it was Alexei’s mother, the English-speaking Tsarina Alexandra Fyodorovna, who helped him to choose the dog’s name, spelling it out for him in the English manner in one of her letters to him. This also explains why Joy received an English name, at a time when a French name and spelling, such as Joie (Жуá, when rendered into Russian letters) would have been more usual amongst the uppermost layers of Russian society.With respect to the actual event of the family’s murder in the half-cellar room of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, we know that the three dogs were living with their masters in the house at the time of the murders. However, and as with almost everything else connected with the murder of the Romanovs, beyond the basic facts (i.e., that the family and their retinue of servants were awoken after midnight in the early hours of 17th July 1918 and taken downstairs to the half-cellar room, where they were shot and bayoneted), there is a mass of conflicting and sometimes downright contradictory information about what happened - often presented as fact. As anyone who has spent any time studying the Romanov murders knows, it is a morass of inconsistencies. Now, over one hundred years after the event and short of the sudden opening of a miraculous and hitherto unknown file in the Russian archives, it is unlikely that we will obtain any further clarity, other than knowing that the entire family perished (a fact that itself took about ninety years to establish beyond reasonable doubt). So it is with the fate of the family’s dogs - except Joy.Tsesarevitch Alexei with Joy and one of the family’s pet cats, variously identified over the years as Zubrovka or Vashka (presumably short for Vasiliy). From the appearance and clothing of the Tsesarevitch, this photograph would date from circa 1915–16.On the night of the murder itself, the surviving accounts tell us that, after having risen, washed and dressed themselves, the family then proceeded down the staircase of the house from the first floor where their rooms were located, out into the rear yard, re-entering the house at that part where the half-cellar room was located. Some stories regarding what actually happened in the half-cellar room tell of the corpse of a small dog (possibly Jemmy) slipping out from the sleeve of one of the slain Grand Duchesses (usually identified as Anastasia) when her body was being lifted from the floor after the killings. However, I think that that is just fanciful embroidery of an already complicated situation. To me, it ‘smacks’ too much of tales of aristocratic ladies in previous centuries keeping tiny lapdogs (or even ermine) as companions for warmth as a kind of living muff in winter. This was the twentieth century, and it was July in the northern hemisphere, so summertime. Moreover, none of the family’s dogs was a lapdog, so it is difficult to see how anyone could have concealed a dog about their body and clothing in that room and situation.None of the surviving accounts of the murderers themselves mentions the presence of any dogs in the murder room. Nor do the accounts speak of any barking in the room when the firing started - human cries and screams, yes; canine barking, no. Also, none of the accounts mentions the presence of any dogs with the family as they descended the staircase on their final journey. The Tsar was carrying his son, the Tsesarevitch Alexei, who was too sick to walk at the time, so obviously neither of them was attending to a dog at the time. As for the women in the party, there is mention of some of them carrying pillows, but no dogs.By all accounts, the Romanovs and their retinue were all calm, almost stoic, as they descended the staircase. There were no protests, no shouts, no sobs, no tears. If they had an inkling of what was about to happen to them, they did not show it. This leads to a conundrum. If the family had been devoted enough to their pet dogs to bring them all the way to Yekaterinburg in exile, but the dogs were not with them as they descended the staircase on that final night, why were the family apparently so lacking in emotion?I think that this is, and always has been, my favourite photograph of the Tsesarevitch in the company of Joy. Taken at the children’s pond in the park of their home, the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, south of St. Petersburg. Again, from the appearance of the Tsesarevitch and his clothing, I would place this photograph at circa 1914–15.I believe that the explanation lies in whatever they were told when they were upstairs and being awoken, as the reasons for the need to get up in the middle of the night and move. We don’t know exactly what they were told, but obviously it was sufficient for them to get up and go downstairs without any visible emotion. Everybody knew at the time that forces hostile to the Bolsheviks were encircling Yekaterinburg - the guns of battle were audible within the city itself - and so the popular belief is that the family was told that there was shooting in town and that they needed to be moved for their own safety. Whether that ‘moving’ meant just going downstairs to the basement of the house for the rest of the night or something involving a journey away from the house is unclear, but clearly they were not to take anything with them. If a journey was to be involved, perhaps they were told that all of their possessions (including their dogs) would be packed up and would follow.One theory that has gained in currency over the past twenty-five or so years is that Yakov Yurovskiy, the Bolsheviks’ commander in the house and himself a former photographer, told the family that there were rumours circulating about the family’s escape or demise (how ironic) and therefore his superiors in Moscow were demanding that a photograph of the family be taken as proof of their safety, before they were moved anywhere else. The ‘photograph’ theory helps to explain why the family and their retinue were positioned in a certain way in the half-cellar room (as if for a photograph) and also why the dogs would not have been present in the room at the time. In any event, whatever the family was told, it was sufficient to get them into that room without difficulty or protest - and without their dogs. I do not believe that the dogs were in the room at the time.This photograph, taken in the spring of 1917 after the February Revolution and during the house arrest of the Imperial Family at the Alexander Palace, Tsarskoye Selo, is more significant than first meets the eye. The Tsesarevitch and his elder sister, Grand Duchess Tatiana, are sitting on the canal bank beside the bridge in the park of the Alexander Palace, with Tatiana’s dog Ortino in the foreground. The head of the bridge marked the furthest extent in the park to which the Imperial Family was permitted to go during the period of their house arrest. Other variants of this photograph that exist show the presence of guards (out of shot in this particular variant) at the bridgehead, which may explain the subdued, pensive look on the faces of both Alexei and TatianaWhat happened next has of course passed into legend. At some time around about 2 am in the morning, a firing squad led by Yurovskiy entered the room and a death sentence was read out, at which point the shooting began. The Tsar died first in a hail of bullets, thereby consummating the Revolution. His death was followed in rapid succession by that of the Tsarina and of two of the attendants, the valet Trupp and the cook Kharitonov. Dr. Botkin, the family’s physician, was injured in the leg, fell and apparently received a further, fatal bullet whilst reaching across to tend to his already deceased sovereign.At this point, none of the children except the Grand Duchess Maria, who had received a thigh wound, was even injured. However, the unsuitability of the half-cellar as a murder scene was revealed as it had quickly filled with smoke from the disorganised firing of the pistols, rendering it impossible for the firing squad to distinguish their intended victims anymore. The doors to the room were therefore opened to allow the smoke to disperse and the firing squad to regroup for a few minutes, before the killing recommenced.At this point, the story becomes particularly ugly and distressing.The crippled but uninjured Tsesarevitch, still sitting blood-splattered and transfixed on the chair that had been brought in for him to sit on before the firing began, had an entire cartridge spent on him by co-conspirator Grigoriy Nikulin - giving rise to the legendary phrase in the accounts, “the strange vitality of the Heir”. Yurovskiy then intervened and fired two bullets behind one of his ears. Thus did Joy’s master meet his end.The elder sisters, the Grand Duchesses Olga and Tatiana, were apparently cowering in a protective embrace at the back of the room, and were killed by bullets to the jaw and / or skull. The remaining two sisters, the younger Grand Duchesses Maria and Anastasia, similarly locked in a protective embrace, were shot and bayoneted. Last to die was the maid Anna Demidova who, having fainted when the firing initially began, regained consciousness and was bayoneted as she tried to protect herself with a pillow that she had brought with her.Finally, and as the bodies of the family and their retinue were being moved on to makeshift stretchers for transportation away from the house, one - perhaps two - of the sisters showed signs of life. The accounts speak of strange gargling sounds coming from some of the bodies and, in one case, of one of the sisters crying out and raising her arm across her face in a movement of self-defence. This led to the bayoneting of the all of the bodies present, whereupon they fell silent.If the Bolsheviks had chosen the half-cellar room as the murder scene in an attempt to muffle the sounds of their shooting, the failure of their attempt soon became apparent. By the account of guardsman Alexei Kabanov, who had been sent out of the house at the time of the murders to listen for sounds from the street, the shooting could be heard all over the neighbourhood (which had been woken up by the noise) - as well as the sound of dogs’ barking coming from within the house. Thus we know that there were dogs in the Ipatiev House at the time of the murders.A colourised photograph of the Tsesarevitch with Joy, apparently next to the Imperial Train, either in their way to or returning from the Imperial Military Headquarters at Mogilev, White Russia (now Mahilyow, Belarus). From the appearance of the Tsesarevitch and his military-style clothing, I would place this as circa 1916.Out of the three dogs whom the Romanovs brought with them to Yekaterinburg, their exact fates - with the exception of Joy’s - become blurry and obscured by contradictory statements often presented as fact, just like that of their masters. In the case of Ortino (Tatiana’s dog) and Jemmy (Anastasia’s dog), they essentially pass out of reliable, recorded history in the early hours of the morning of 17th July 1918.Although the accounts are not entirely reliable, the most widely accepted story regarding Ortino holds that he met a brutal but quick end, shortly after that of his masters. In the immediate aftermath of the murders, so the story goes, he was found greatly agitated and barking at the top of the stairs down which the family had descended perhaps an hour earlier. One of the guards, irritated at Ortino’s barking, is said to have taken his bayonet to the dog, essentially impaling the poor animal to death. Whilst killing Ortino, the guard is recorded as uttering the words, “A dog’s death to dogs!” („Собачья смѣрть для собакъ!“) - apparently more in reference to the recently slain Romanovs than to the unfortunate dog himself.Whilst many reported details of the circumstances of the Romanovs’ murder have to be regarded with skepticism, we do know that some of the co-murderers at the scene were inebriated and that, having finished the deed, all were in a state of high excitement and agitation. Therefore, I find this quote about Ortino’s death to be plausible. What I find less plausible, however, is the continuation of the story of Ortino’s fate. Some versions allege that Ortino’s body was tossed into the back of the Fiat truck in the yard of the Ipatiev House that was being loaded with the still-warm corpses of the Romanovs and their retinue, for transportation away from the house. Like the idea of one of dogs slipping dead out of the sleeve of one of the Grand Duchesses in the murder room, I find the idea of Ortino’s acting after death as some kind of Cerberus over his slain masters to belong, again, to the realm of fanciful embroidery of the Romanov story. No canine bones were discovered at the two sites where the bodies of the Romanovs and their retainers were later discovered and disinterred, in 1991 and 2007 respectively. It is a sad thing to say, but I think that it is more likely that the body of Ortino ended up on a rubbish heap near the Ipatiev House.Regarding Jemmy, his fate is the most mysterious of them all. Yurovskiy and his men, having transported the bodies of the Romanovs and their retinue outside of Yekaterinburg, initially tried in the early morning of 17th July 1918 to dispose of them in a disused, partially flooded mineshaft in the forests outside of the city. When - like the murder scene itself - the unsuitability of the mineshaft for its purpose became eminently obvious, the corpses were removed over the course of the next day and transported further into the forest where, in an almost comical turn of events due to the failure of Yurovskiy to plan adequately for the disposal of the bodies, they were eventually and at great haste buried in shallow graves at two different sites.The reason for mentioning this in the context of Jemmy’s fate is that, when the murders were investigated by the White Russian investigator Nikolai Sokolov from the summer of 1918 onwards, the corpse of a dog was retrieved from the aforementioned mineshaft in the spring of 1919. Whilst the corpse was identified as Jemmy by a surviving member of the Romanovs’ retinue (if I remember correctly, the identification was done either by French tutor Pierre Gilliard or by English tutor Sidney Gibbes), the finding of a dog’s corpse in the mineshaft led to more questions than it provided answers.The state of decomposition of the corpse indicated that it had been placed in the water-logged mineshaft perhaps only 2–3 months before, rather than the previous summer. Also, the question of whether the corpse was actually that of Jemmy was never satisfactorily answered, notwithstanding the identification by one of the Romanovs’ former retainers.If the dog was indeed Jemmy and had been killed and placed in the mineshaft months after the occurrence of the murders on 17th July 1918, who had been looking after him in the intervening period, and why? To those questions, we just don’t have any answers. There is however a consensus now that the placing of the body of a dog - who may or may not have been Jemmy - in the mineshaft was as a ‘red herring’, a piece of false evidence that was deliberately planted there to mislead whomever the person doing the planting wanted to mislead.In this regard, it could have been the Bolsheviks, to cause the White investigators to give more credence to the importance of the mineshaft than they should have (‘If the dog is here, then the bodies of the family must be nearby’). Equally, it could have been someone on the White investigation team, to garner support for what turned out to be an inconclusive investigation (‘Look, we found the dog - it won’t be long before we find the family. Just a little more time and money, please’). In the end, Sokolov’s investigation never found the bodies of the family and their retainers, although, frustratingly, there is a photograph of Sokolov standing - unbeknown to him - literally metres away from one of the burial sites. C’est bizarre. In any event, the fate of Jemmy is inconclusive.With apologies to all animal lovers: the alleged remains of Jemmy, Anastasia’s dog, photographed upon their recovery in the spring of 1919 by White investigators from the abandoned mineshaft outside of Yekaterinburg, which had been the initial resting place of the murdered Tsar and his familyThis brings us to Joy, Alexei’s dog.Again, the accounts of his whereabouts in the immediate aftermath of the murders are inconsistent. Some accounts place him in the by-then abandoned Ipatiev House when it was entered by the White forces eight days after the murders, clawing at the doors of the empty part of the house where the family had once lived. Other, perhaps more plausible accounts, have him being spotted on the streets of Yekaterinburg by members of the White forces who had known the Imperial Family intimately and hence recognised him as the Tsesarevitch’s dog on sight. Apparently, and after being spotted, he was followed to the house of a former guard in the Ipatiev House, named Letyemin, who had taken him in and was looking after him after the murders. In this context, it is well-known from the searches conducted by the White forces upon their occupation of Yekaterinburg in July 1918 - initially in the hope of finding the Tsar and his family still alive, and later for evidence of their murders - that large quantities of the family’s personal property were found in the possession of former guards from the Ipatiev House - things like items of clothing, icons, bibles, books and trivial pieces of jewellery.As for Joy himself, he came into the guardianship of a Russian officer attached to the British Expeditionary Forces in Siberia, named Paul (Pavel’) Rodzianko. From Yekaterinburg, Joy was taken to the British headquarters in the city of Omsk where, in the weeks after the murders, he had his final encounter with his former life in the form of a meeting with Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden, another surviving member of the Romanovs’ retinue who had followed them into exile.In the case of the Baroness, she had lived with the family in the Governors’ Mansion at Tobol’sk, their penultimate place of residence until April / May 1918, but had been prevented from joining them in the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, whence she had returned to Tobol’sk. By all accounts, Joy had been traumatised by his experiences at Yekaterinburg and had become at least partially blind by the time of his reunion with Baroness Buxhoeveden.As the Baroness tells it, the dog nevertheless recognised her upon her coming into the room at Omsk, apparently from the smell of her clothes, which were the same as the ones that she had worn at Tobol’sk, before her separation from the family. According to her account, Joy went into a frenzy of joy upon recognising her, apparently believing that her return meant that a reunion with his master the Tsesarevitch could not be far behind. When that did not happen, however, the dog went into a state of despondency and would not be comforted.Joy, during his years of exile and retirement in England, in the 1920’s.Upon Rodzianko’s departure from Siberia as part of withdrawal of the British Expeditionary Forces through Vladivostok in 1919/20, Joy accompanied him. Upon arrival in England, Joy was sent to a farm-steading on the Great Park Estate at Windsor called Sefton Lawn. I am not sure whether Rodzianko continued to live with Joy at this time, or just visited him, but the former Russian officer continued to maintain contact with the dog. Indeed, there is a heartbreaking account from this period of Rodzianko’s looking into Joy’s limpid brown eyes and wondering what he had witnessed at Yekaterinburg to cause his sight to fail.Joy never saw Russia again nor, as far as I am aware, did he have any further contact with the surviving members of the Russian Imperial Family, although some of them did settle in England. Although the murder of the Tsesarevitch alongside the Tsar and the rest of the family was not publicly admitted by the Soviets until 1926, perhaps the surviving members of the Imperial Family in England found the idea of contact with the favourite companion of the slain Tsesarevitch just a little too painful.Joy lived out his days at Sefton Lawn, passing away at some point in the 1920’s (I have not been able to ascertain the exact date). He was buried in the garden, with a tombstone bearing the simple inscription “Here lies Joy”. Unfortunately, the site of Sefton Lawn was later redeveloped, and my understanding is that it is now a car park, so it is no longer possible to visit his grave in a meaningful way even if you would like to.Out of the fourteen members of the Russian Imperial Household - seven family members, four retainers and three pet dogs - who entered the Ipatiev House, only one undoubtedly survived. He was a dog, and his name was Joy.Собака по имени « Джой » - A dog named Joy(Fair use of images for educational, non-commercial purposes: no infringement of any copyright intended. If any image in this article is yours and you would like me to remove it from this article, please let me know in the comments below and I will be happy to remove it.)